Carriers

Cover your mouth when you cough, please.

Carriers is a 2009 horror film about four people fleeing a viral pandemic. Two brothers, Brian and Danny, along with Brian's girlfriend Bobby and Danny's friend Kate, are heading to a place where they believe they can take shelter and wait for the viral pandemic to die out - a place called Turtle Beach, where Brian and Danny used to spend their holidays as children. Of course it all goes to hell from there.

In order to survive, the group agrees to a set of rules:

1. Avoid contact with the infected at all costs.

2. Sanitize anything an infected person might have touched in the past 24 hours.

3. There's nothing you can do to help the infected; they're already dead.

4. If you follow these rules, you'll live ... maybe.

But then again, it's easy to come up with a set of rules; it's much harder to actually stick to them. Think of it as a road movie version of Cabin Fever played bone chillingly straight.

Tropes used in Carriers include:

• Abandoned Emergency Makeshift Clinic
• A House Divided: Some of the characters are more sentimental than others.
• Apocalypse How: Seems to be a Class 0, or possibly a Class 1.
• Apocalyptic Log: Only small pieces here and there, such as the gas station sign altered to read 'MIKE DEAD MEET ME AT DADS'.
  • Possibly a Shout-Out to Left 4 Dead.
• Bittersweet Ending: Danny and Kate survive and arrive at Turtle Beach, but all Danny can do is think about his childhood there with his now dead brother, and that he will always be alone.
• Bottomless Magazines: Maybe but probably averted - Brian has an M1911 pistol, which holds 8 rounds (7 + 1 in the chamber), yet nobody is ever shown reloading the gun. However, time passes between scenes so it's reasonable to assume it was reloaded as necessary over that time, since it was never fired too many times at once.
• The Chosen One: Brian says that he considers himself 'chosen', since he dug graves for 400 bucks a day and yet never got sick, while people who instantly holed themselves away died. Frank then immediately calls him out on this, asking what the hell makes him so much more worthy of living than his infected five-year-old daughter.
• Death By Pragmatism: While all the characters are relatively Genre Savvy when it comes to survival, Brian - the most pragmatic of the bunch - dies.
• Deconstruction: Sure, many horror films are filled with young groups who die from being Genre Blind. But this movie goes to show just how hellish it would be to stick to unsympathetic survival rules no matter what the cost. Sure, you might survive - maybe - but would it even be worth it in the end? And could there have been situations that might have been avoided if they showed an ounce of compassion?
• Development Hell: The movie was finished as far back as 06 but was shelved for 2 years, before finally getting a limited release in '09.
• Disaster Scavengers: How the group gets by.
• The Fundamentalist: One of the radio stations has a long, furious sermon from a minister saying how the plague was an act of God to punish the wicked and 'seperate the wheat from the chaff' ... until he starts coughing.
• Genre Savvy: The four main characters have a set pragmatic, unsentimental rules that they follow in order to stay alive.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Some characters (especially Brian) are determined to survive, no matter the cost.
• Incurable Cough of Death: The main symptom of the disease, combined with Blood From the Mouth. Getting coughed on is the most common way to get infected, but skin to skin contact also works.
  • The disease is also literally incurable.
• Justified Criminal: They scavenge what they need from abandoned places and from the dead.
• Mercy Kill: The doctor who poisons a group of infected children, rather than letting them suffer for days in agony before dying from an incurable disease. Also being infected, he kills himself as well.
• Pay Phone: One of Kate's quirks is checking every single payphone she comes across, trying to find one with a dialtone so that she can contact her parents. Bobby eventually mocks her for it, saying that her parents are obviously dead. Near the end, Kate looks at another phone ... and doesn't bother checking.
• Psycho Party Member: Brian
• The Scapegoat: The group witnesses a bunch of rednecks shooting a fleeing asian man. The next day the dead man's corpse is tied to a windmill with the sign 'chinks brought it'.
• Sex Slave: When the group is ambushed by the men in HAZMAT suits, they order everyone to leave ... except the girls.
  • Although one of them protests and would have been forced to leave had the other survivalists not discovered that Bobby was infected.
• Safe Zone Hope Spot:
• Shoot the Dog: Brian leaving the father and daughter behind. Brian leaving Bobby behind. Brian shooting two older women when they refuse to give them gas. Daniel literally shoots an infected dog that attacks him. Daniel stealing the car keys, and eventually shooting Brian.
• Too Dumb to Live: The way Bobby was infected - she broke their makeshift quarantine to help an infected girl who was choking on her own blood. Arguably all of them they all break containment at multiple points and make endlessly ill-thought out choices.
• What Happened to Mommy?: Both painfully subverted with Bobby as they just decided to leave her behind, and played brutally straight with Brian, as his brother shot him in the desert.
• The Plague
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Brian, above all the others, is determined to survive no matter what he has to do ... even break his own rules.
• Youth Is Wasted on the Dumb: Although all of the main cast agree to Genre Savvy rules, they're still too immature to survive on pragmatism alone. Many situations could have been avoided if they had been mature enough to handle the moral quandaries they come across or act like an actual team. For example, if the group stopped enabling Brian's dangerous attitude early on before it got out of control.
• Zombie Infectee: Infectee in the traditional, medical sense, but the trope still applies.